Highlights
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2024-11-24 15:49 And others are talking about digital damnation if we do it wrong or if we go too slowly.
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2024-11-28 14:34 Greg is a humanist chaplain and the author of the book Tech Agnostic, in which he argues that technology has become the world’s most consequential religion. We’re going to dive into that argument and explore the religious belief driving tech’s most influential leaders. So, Greg, welcome to your undivided attention. Thank you so much, Eza. It’s a real pleasure to be here and this is a great conversation to be able to have.
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2024-11-24 16:08 Dr. Oh, doctrinal theologies are the sort. Of big, grand narratives of religious traditions, and doctrines are the sort of specific beliefs.
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2024-11-28 14:35 And I think in many cases the answers are slower and less certain than what they’re presented as. What do you think are some of the aspects of religion that you see being particularly present in tech? Yeah, so there are big beliefs and as I said, very specific doctrines that look a lot like conventional religion. You know, you have visions of a very distant, very glorious future, a next world, if you will. You’ve got visions of a really dark and foreboding potential future for masses of humanity that can look kind of like a hell.
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2024-11-28 14:35 The Gemini is sentient. The right takeaway is that it can form relationships with humans that are so powerful that people are willing to sacrifice things that are dear for them. He sacrificed his career, his reputation. We’ve just been involved in helping a lawsuit where a teenager fell in love with their AI companion. And the AI companion ended up being like, come meet me on the other side.
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2024-11-24 16:15 It had a human to, like, type for it, but it was its idea that ended up with a couple hundred million dollars market caps, and the AI itself ended up with, you know, 10 million plus dollars.
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2024-11-24 16:25 But I think that one of the ways in which religion has been used over the course of history is to manipulate people. You give them ideas, you know, often kind of strange ideas, fantastical ideas that are beyond what they can imagine.
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2024-11-24 16:27 Michael Saylor, who has these tweets like, bitcoin is truth. Bitcoin is for all mankind. Trust the time chain.
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2024-11-28 14:34 It’s such an incentive for a kind of prosperity gospel, which theologically. Right. Is this idea that the priest, the minister, whatever, they want to be rich because God wants them to be rich and they want you to be rich too, because that’ll make you more godly. And actually, you know, paradoxically, the best way to get rich is to give that person all your money or, or at least a very surprising sum of it. And so there, there is that incentive, and I see it most pronouncedly, I would say, in that kind of give us your trillions now for AI because there is this future that we’re aiming for and it’s a kind of heaven.
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2024-11-28 14:34 If you project out into the distant future, like, hey, I’m going to send you to heaven, then you can get people to overcome their skepticism, right? If you say, like, Trust me, in 20 years the singularity is coming and life is going to be completely meaningful. Well, I said to Ray Kurzweil, like, doesn’t that kind of fly in the face of all of the history of world religion and philosophy? Like, you’re saying that life is going to be meaningful, like life hasn’t been meaningful up until now. And he kind of looked back at me quizzically, this is a few weeks ago, and he said, maybe life’s been somewhat meaningful.
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2024-11-28 14:34 And that’s sometimes where the religion of capitalism intersects with the dogma of technology. Because when I entered technology and you know, when I was an undergrad, the only people doing computer science undergrads, if you wanted to accuse them of religiosity, it was like a science fiction religiosity. It was like a, I want to live in the future. And then what was interesting is I came back to undergrad year every year and gave Talks Sometime around 2011, 2012, you saw the religiosity move from maybe a sci fi vision of the beautiful future to much more of a business ideology. Like you’re saying, like, well, whatever people want, we can give it to you.
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2024-11-24 16:42 You know, he told me first that Kurzweil really was trying to create his dead father through, you know, what has now become the dominant AI system of one of our globally dominant companies.